In the past four decades the study of legal language has been carried out by scholars in a number of academic disciplines including law, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science and sociology. Research has often been pursued by scholars affiliated with the social sciences, since legal language is a socially-situated phenomenon. The law, as a social institution expressing the rules and regulations of a society, governs a special relationship between the individual and the society. Generally, laws are codified in legal documents that are created and implemented by legal professionals. These professionals are part of a society's legal infrastructure, which is focused on organizing and regulating the system of penalties for breaking laws, or, from another perspective, on pursuing justice. As legal scholars have pointed out, the drafting of laws and regulations is a linguistic matter, since one must neither say too much, resulting in an overly strict legal code, nor say too little, which may result in unacceptable behaviors (Gibbons 1994: 3). The system that begins with the creation of laws and up through any sort of enforcement in a court of law operates entirely through language, and this is one of the reasons that the law is an attractive topic for linguists. The complex links between language and society, and the form and content of law hold special interest for linguists interested in pragmatics.
When we turn to the language of the courtroom in particular, it is obvious upon reflection, for instance, that the term "courtroom discourse" encompasses many different kinds of spoken and written language: the verbal interaction in a trial among all participants (judges, lawyers, witnesses, defendants, etc.), judges' instructions to juries, sentencing, lawyer talk, depositions, testimonies, evidence, etc. Whether the focus is on spoken language in the courtroom or on its attendant written documents, the idea of the courtroom assumes interaction among participants. The legal domain, and especially courtroom discourse, thus offers linguists a wide arena for carrying out pragmatic and contextually-oriented research, and this line of work has blossomed over the past two decades.
Rather than attempting to cover the large field of language and the law, this chapter surveys representative articles and monographs that explore various aspects of courtroom discourse from a historical pragmatic perspective. Of course, even the field called historical pragmatics is large and contains diverse approaches and foci (for recent overviews, see the introduction to this handbook, as well as Taavitsainen and Fitzmaurice 2007; Jucker 2008). Thus, the inclusions are selected on the basis of their examination of pragmatic aspects of interaction and the focus on either diachronic changes or synchronic exploration of particular discourse fea-
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